How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Ancillary texts are the texts which help to promote the main product, our slasher film teaser trailer. The ancillary texts that we have used to advertise the teaser trailer are a poster and a website. The ancillary texts should have constant themes running throughout all three texts in order to be easily identifiable. The combination of our poster, website and trailer have been effective and successful as they have all formed the solid brand of identity of 'The Rippers Shadow'.

"The Ripper's Shadow" Poster

The name of the trailer links to the poster imagery used as shows a male shadow over the eye. This combines the image we have used and the name of the teaser trailer. We created the image for the backgrounds of the website and poster through the same software for iMovie, this is shown through the blog post, "process to final poster". We believe this image overlay made through iMovie gave a similar image quality between the trailer and ancillary tasks, making them visually match.

As Shown, the poster is very similar to the website, by using the same background image and same colour scheme, the two media products are clearly linked, this blog explains why we chose to do this.. The red colour on the promotion website and poster combines well with the genre of the teaser trailer, so although the trailer does not contain any colour but black and white, the red colour can be used as a semiotic of blood. So combines the trailers genre with the ancillary tasks well.

"The Ripper's Shadow" Website Homepage

Another theme that runs through both ancillary texts and the trailer is the image of eye. On both the poster and the website homepage as well as parts of the trailer there are a selection of different eyes which not only reinforces the genre of the film but also maintains the films brand of identity as a slasher. As an eye is a good representation of a victim, relating to the aspects of the slasher genre.

"Saw" film website

The dark colours of the website and its layout fit directly into the horror genre which combines well with the narrative and genre of our teaser trailer. Such as the "Saw" films promotion website. 

Le Mis Website Homepage

Le Mis Poster

We used the poster background without the billing block (see blog on billing block) and  as the website background, so the image will be memorable. We used this strategy from Le miserables. Although they had a larger budget so their image of one of the characters was displayed on many medias such as busses and television adverts. We followed the similarities between the poster and the website of Le Miserables by putting the important reviews on the website (see blog on why we chose these reviews) which were most relevant to our target audience. Therefore, we decided that there would be more reviews on the website homepage compared to the poster, as these medias are very different and the simpler the poster the more enticing it could be to the audience to look at it. 



Overall, we believe that the ancillary texts combine well with the teaser trailer. This effective combination of the three media texts is demonstrated through the black and white colour schemes, the genre and audience representations and the image used.